The Challenges of Bible Translation (2 of 2)

The last century as has seen a drastic increase in number and style of Bible translations, resulting in considerable debate over the benefits of literal versus non-literal translations. Thanks for joining us as we discuss the unique challenges facing Bible translators as they wrestle with the task of transferring words and ideas from one language to another.

The Challenges of Bible Translation

The Challenges of Bible
Translation: Part 2 of 2

[music]

Announcer:The last century
has seen a
drastic increase in number and style of Bible translations resulting in
considerable debate over the benefits of literal versus non-literal
translations. Thanks for joining us as we discuss the unique challenges
facing Bible translators as they wrestle with the task of transferring
words and ideas from one language to another. Part 2.

Dr. Darrell Bock:
So what's the difference between formal and dynamic and what are you
trying to decide. Audience is one factor. What else?

Dr. Robert Chisholm:Well to
me, audience is
everything. The purpose of translation is to communicate God's word to
people who are unable to read Greek, Hebrew and a little bit of Aramaic
and so we want them to be able to read God's word and understand it as
it was intended to be understood so to me, audience is the key factor.
Then you have to decide well, what age level are we shooting for?

I remember when I was in journalism school they told us to assume in
writing news articles that the average reader out there is not at that
high a level of understanding and so I think you have to make a
conscious decision what age level are we shooting for and I would think
junior high. I would like someone to be able to understand the
translation if they are in seventh or eighth grade. I would like them
to be able to understand clearly what the Bible is saying and not be
confused and so that is one of the reasons why we do translations and I
think it is impossible to do a purely formal or literal translation and
I can illustrate that.

Darrell:We'll come back to
that in a
second because I think that's an interesting point. So that means then
when you come to do your translation, you face the choice of the
audience. The second choice that you face is, is this formal dynamic
difference between am I going to stay, if I can say it this way, stay
as close to the expression of the original language as I can which is
formal equivalence or am I really going to try and put it in the most
natural sense, in the target language and bring out the meaning, the
ambiguities of the text, what the text really means which pushes us
more in the direction of dynamic equivalence. So you really have got,
to think of a grid, you've got your audience concern here, you have got
your formal and dynamic equivalence level here, so when you actually go
to choose a word in a particular passage, you've got to decide is that
word too complex for my audience? Is that word a good reflection of the
original or is there a better word that actually brings out the sense
of the passage. All those things happen in any single choice. It makes
translation work very difficult, doesn't it?

Robert:Yes and you are not
dealing just
with words, that's not the way language words, words in isolation. A
lot of those who promote formal or very wooden, I say literal
translations, they are just dealing with language at a word-for-word
level end with really if you do that you will end up with an inner
linear, something of that nature. You are not dealing with words. You
are dealing with phrases, sentences, discourse structures. English is
different than Hebrew.

Darrell:
Yeah.

Robert:
And so I am looking at Hebrew and I'm trying to figure out what these
words mean, what these phrases mean in their context.

Darrell:
Idioms.

Robert:Idioms and then trying
to figure
out what is the best way to say that in my target language to my target
audience which in my way of thinking would probably be junior high
level.

Darrell:Now you've suggested
this
already but let's press it a little bit. No one is a complete formalist
in translation. Is that a fair statement?

Robert:
No way. Would you like me to illustrate what a pure formal translation
would look like?

Darrell:
You look so you are so ready to do this so if I delay it any longer we
might have problems so I don't want any issues.

Robert:
I am going to give you a purely formal word-for-word translation of
Psalm 16:3 in the Hebrew text.

Darrell:
OK.

Robert:"To the holy ones who
are in the
land they and the mighty ones of all my desire in them" and that's an
especially difficult passage in Psalm 16 but there are others like it.
Psalm 73:9 and 10, this is an interesting one and when you read the
translations of these texts in any translation, it's going to look like
it is understandable. That's because the translator has made many, many
decisions in order to bring some kind of sense out of it, but when you
look at what actually is there in the text. Here is Psalm 73 nine and
10 in the Hebrew text, "They set in the heavens their mouth and their
tongue walks in the earth." We've got walking tongues here.

[laugher]

Robert:
Verse 10.

Therefore, he will return or he
will bring back [there's ancient Jewish scribal variation there) his
people here and waters of fullness will be sucked up by them." Okay.

As a translator I have to really get into all the words and phrases
find out
what idioms will be involved and I might even have to go with some
textual decisions where I will go with some alternate readings that are
represented in the Septuigiant. In difficult
poetic passages in the Old Testament sometimes I need to reconstruct
what the original meaning may have looked like so it's a very difficult
task especially in poetry but even in prose you can't go according to a
purely format word-for-word type of translation. Here is Ruth 4:11 and
12 literal, wooden, formal, "and they said all the people who were in
the
gate and the elders witnesses may the Lord give the women the one
coming to your house like Rachel and like Leah who built the two of
them the house of Israel and do strength in Ephrathah and call a name
in Bethlehem and may your house be like the house of Perez whom she
bore
Tamar to Judah from the seed which he will give the Lord to you from a
young woman the this."

I'm simply trying to illustrate the Hebrew idiom, word order all of
these things are different and so we have to figure out okay what's
happening lexically, syntactically, what's going on here in the target
text and then bring it over to the target language in a way that it is
understandable so that everyone engages in interpretation at some level
in order to be able to translate.

Darrell:Even after you've
done that,
once you decide what all the pieces are to make the thing fit together
in that sense then you have got the choice within the English language
of which particular words you are going to render and it makes all the
difference in the world whether you are talking about trying to do a
Bible for an under 12 audience or a regular translation because you are
going to have multiple synonyms which you can choose from potentially
in the target language and you have to ask yourself which one of these
does the best job of telling us what the passage is really saying.

Mark Yarbrough:And from one
language to another, you are talking about basic
issues of verbs and nouns and the placement of those because as you are
reading those and you are listening to a very static rendering of the
text, as you relay that into English, it slaughters the English
language.

Robert:
Yes I always tell my students the NASB and I am not picking on it.

Mark:
Sure. Sure.

Robert:That really does not
reflect English
the way anyone speaks English. It is an attempt to be rather wooden. No
one speaks that way. There is a lot of jargon, religious jargon that
comes in, in translations, but we struggle with some basic issues and
the English language changes so quickly and there are other issues that
come up. Very often, when someone wants to champion a literal
translation what that often means is they are taking the primary
meaning of the word that is listed in the dictionary and they are
insisting on translating that word that way, every time.

A good example is Genesis 4:13 where Cain, after the Lord told him what
his punishment would be he said "My sin is too great for me to bear."
He uses the Hebrew word "avon" the primary meaning of which is sin in
equity. But, when you go to a dictionary and you study the use of that
Hebrew word, you discover that that word can sometimes mean guilt.
There is a clear connection there. We can it metonymy. There is a
substitution. Sin produces guilt. So, sometimes when they really mean
guilt, our concept of guilt, they'll still use that word, "avon", for
sin. The word can also mean punishment.

So, if you sin, that makes you guilty. While if you're guilty,
sometimes you get punished. And, so that word can have any of those
nuances depending on the context. So, sometimes, someone who is
proposing a literal translation, would say, well, I think it should be
translated "My sin is too much for me to bear." What does that mean?
Think about what is sin? Is sin some kind of a burden that you are
carrying? It is too heavy for you to bear? The statement doesn't really
mean anything.

If you look at in context, he is using the word "avon" in the sense of
punishment. The Lord has just dished out his punishment, and he doesn't
like it. He thinks it is too severe. So why not translate it in a way
that communicates that? My punishment is too much for me to bear.

You get into the same problem with metaphors. For the Psalmist, he
might say "The Lord is my shield." No problem. We are familiar with
shields. We know what a shield's function is, to protect one. But what
about when he says, "The Lord is my rock." He uses the Hebrew word
"tsur". The Lord is my rock. Ok. What does that mean? The Lord is like
something I can pick up and throw at somebody? The Lord is like a
boulder who is in my way. What does that mean? What idea does it convey?

Well, if you study the use of the term in the Old Testament, I think
what the Psalmist is saying is "The Lord is my rock cliff." Well, for
an English reader, that would maybe suggest that He is something I have
to climb. He is inaccessible. Or what does that mean? Dangerous. I
don't want to be on a rocky cliff. What it is reflecting, He is a rock
cliff in the sense that He is a place where you can go to get away from
your enemies. You'll be relatively safe. You'll be up high and
inaccessible.

So, to just translate "The Lord is my rock" and not interpret the
metaphor, I think is not going to communicate to an English reader.
Because there is a potential for all kinds of misunderstandings of rock
means. So, at that point as a translator, I think you almost have to
interpret the metaphor and just say "The Lord is my protector." Or
something like that, unless you have a study bible with a lot of notes
where you can translate the metaphor "The Lord is my rocky cliff."
Then, in the note explain what that means.

Darrell:And so, what you've
done is to
defend why we have slightly more dynamic kinds of translations which
are really bringing out the force of the expression. As opposed to the
literal, let's say it this way, lexical term that you might more
naturally translate a particular word as being.

Dr. Hall Harris:But, there is
an underlying
issue here that we ought to underscore for the benefit of people who
don't work in translation. Anybody who knows a second language, any
modern language as a second language, realizes that when you go from
one language to another, you are always making these kinds of
decisions. It is not a one for one substitution, where this word gets
substituted for this word in the other language. And so the idea that
you can simply take a Hebrew or Greek word and look it up in a
Hebrew-English or Greek-English dictionary and perform a substitution
with an English word is really a misunderstanding of the process of
translation. Because even if you going to say my goal is to produce a
literal or word for word translation, you might run into the problem,
and in fact will all over the place, that this Hebrew word when you
look it up in the Hebrew-English dictionary, has three or four or 10 or
15 different English equivalents. So, which one of those are you going
to pick? That is where it becomes really difficult.

To give another example, the Greek word, "logos," which is one of the
more well-known Greek words in The New Testament, which is often
translated "word." As in John's Gospel, which opens, "In the beginning
was the logos." "In the beginning was the word." If you look that up in
the unabridged Greek-English lexicon, Liddel Scott, Jones McKenzie, you
will find that there are over 50 English equivalents for that one Greek
word. Message, report, thing, matter, situation, word, speech. You
know, I
could go on and on. That is the problem. So, even saying I am going to
do a very literal translation doesn't get you out of the woods. You
actually still have all these issues you have to contend with.

Mark:You have an issue also
of the
types of languages. When I taught Greek, I use to use this one just as
a model, and say, you have languages that are built on inflection. In
one word in English, you have to use two words because person is
implied in the verb. And, you would use that and so you can't do word
for word because you would totally miss what is being used there.

Let me ask you another question about this issue of a literal
interpretation. In defense of many folks who constantly throw that type
of terminology around. There are philosophy issues at stake here. And
I'm not being totally stereotypical here, I don't think. But what is
often at stake when someone is wanting to defend a literal
interpretation, I think there is something more that is going on here.
We would all, sitting at this table here, want to defend the truth of
the Word of God. And, that The Word of God does not change. Is that a
little bit of what is going on with some folks that would talk about a
literal interpretation. Is that an issue that they are trying to
defend?

Darrell:And along side that,
I think I
would ask, what is the value of the more formal equivalent? I mean,
part of what we are talking about here is a spectrum. You have a
spectrum for reason. So what is the value of a more formal equivalent
interpretation?

Robert:Well, I think in the
communication process, people are afraid of the human interpretive
factor. Translators have to interpret, and I think some feel they need
to limit that interpretive element as much as possible to stay closer
to what God really said. But, I think fundamentally, that's a
misunderstanding of how communication works, and what God intends to
accomplish through communication. If you just try to translate, I
wouldn't even call it translation, the Greek or Hebrew text at a very
wooden or literal level, then there is not any interpretation involved
in that.

So, in other words, people are going to read an interpretation and
leave the interpretation up to the preacher or the commentary writer or
someone like that. Just give me the Word of God, pure and simple. But,
I think that is what they are afraid of.

Hall:But that goes back to my
earlier
comment about the problem you have even at that level is that when you
look up a Hebrew or Greek word in a dictionary and you find you have to
pick between two, three, four, five, or 50 different English
equivalents. There is interpretation going on even at that level.

Mark:
So, by the very definition of communication, interpretation is implied.

Hall:
It's implied in the process.

Robert:You can't run from it.
The
receiver the receptor is always going to have to interpret what someone
else says. It is the nature of communication.

Hall:And, I want to throw
out,
Darrell, you asked the question a moment ago. What good is there in the
more formal translations? There are a few things in their favor. Not
to make it sound as if it's one sided. One of the things is,
traditionally, these things are
viewed as more helpful for study bibles. You have a little bit better
chance of tracing through a topic or a concept if you are staying a
little bit closer to the word-for-word rendering than if you're being a
little bit more paraphrastic. Because those similarities may be
completely obscured. That is what some people will say about the
advantage of this more.

The other advantage, if it is an advantage, and I happen to think that
what we are striving for here is a balance to be truthful. If you go
all the way to the other end of the scale and do a dynamic equivalent
or paraphrase, you end up with a translation that sounds as if
everybody in the Bible from Adam to Moses to Abraham to Isaiah to Jesus
to Paul-they all speak the same language. It's as if they are all
speaking contemporary English. And so you kind of smooth over some of
the individual style of the individual biblical authors.

You even everything out on the same playing field and you also lose
this sense of what I guess I will call for lack of a better term,
because
there is no technical term for this, a sense of "otherness" or
"foreignness" that I am dealing with a foreign language. I am dealing
with a foreign culture. This culture is not the same, this 21st century
Western culture and so, I personally feel to hit that balance, you need
to have a little bit of the individual author's style and unique
expression and a little bit of the "otherness" but not so much that you
can't understand clearly what's going on.

Now a few years back, I was on a translation panel in Toronto, Canada,
that discussed several of these options and ranges and I made a famous
illustration which I am going to repeat here and that is the character
Yoda from Star Wars.

[laughter]

"Understand Yoda perfectly well you can even if natural English
speak he does not." [laughter] Now didn't all of you understand what I
said? But that's not standard normal English.

Mark:
Right.

Hall:That's not the way you
or I
would speak English to one other. We can understand it because there is
a little bit of shifting going on. They moved the subjects and verbs
and direct objects around. It's a word order thing and the human mind
some languages work like that. Greek has different word order. Hebrew
has different. German and French have different word order than
English. The human mind can process all of it. So, you've got a little
bit
of otherness and foreignness in there just to remind you this is not
21st century American culture I am dealing with but not so much that it
becomes a hindrance to the average reader understanding what's going
on. I will tell you in all the experience that I have that is an
extremely difficult and hard task to get that balance right and that is
one of the reasons why I think we have this huge range of English
translations because there are different takes on this by lots of other
people and they are aiming at lots of different audiences and all other
sorts of things..

Mark:
Whoever would have thought that Yoda would have brought such clarity.

Darrell:I think another way
to think
about this as you think about translations they really are a
benefit to
a person who is more technically trained to deal with the ambiguities
that a translation produces, if you render it more formally. For
example,
your idioms, your rock example is a good one. Okay, this translates and
if
you were giving a quiz on how to translate, you say God is a rock you
wouldn't flunk the student for translating it that way.

It would be a perfectly good translation. But if you are asking what
does it mean, then the next step is to go through the interpretive
process of determining what does "rock" mean when it is used in this
kind
of a context. You took us through that process. Dynamic equivalence
will render it in such a way that, that ambiguity is lost and a choice
is made and the danger that can sometimes happen in that is if the
translators have not made the right choice, you've lost the ability to
determine what the text is really saying and a lot of debates about I
think dynamic equivalence are really complaints about the choices that
the translator at the dynamic equivalent level has made.

Hall:I agree completely the
more
dynamic you get, the more paraphrased you get, the more decisions you
are letting the translate make and you are raising that level for some
people of ambiguity and the fact that the translator may or may not
have gotten it right in this particular instance.

Darrell:So a dynamic
equivalence will be
of some help to someone who-"just tell me what it means. I just want to
know what it means." But in that process you have obscured more
decisions that have been made by the translator and so the benefit on
the one hand is to the person who may not have a lot of background. I
think this explains why The Living Bible was so popular when it first
came out. People could understand it. I can understand the Bible now. I
know what it says. It left the impression that you knew what it was
saying, with that the danger in the move it might not
actually be saying that.

Whereas, the problem with the formal equivalence is you
might be getting an acceptable translation but people were reading it
and going I still don't know what it means so you are hung. So by
getting a balance, the translator takes on the burden of rendering the
text but trying to remove enough ambiguity so that the target reader in
the target language, the target audience is able to really appreciate
what the word of God is saying. I think that is the ultimate goal of
translation.

Hall:Let me add an important
note
here for the benefit of people who are listening who are trained in
Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek and are reading the originals. "What do I
make
of all of this and how do I deal with it," I think there are a couple
of
things that can be said. There are basically a couple of approaches.
One, don't lock yourself into one translation. Read several
different English translations and at least you are getting the
spectrum or range of some of these decisions the translators are making
for you. The other way to handle it is to have a Bible that as
extensive notes that explain to you it takes one translation in some
cases perhaps more formal and in other cases perhaps more paraphrased
or dynamic but it give you in the notes the range of options that are
actually out there and shows you the process by which the translators
made their choices and decisions. Now that's the tact the NET Bible has
taken is to have an understandable, readable translation but include in
the extensive notes, the other alternatives and options so that you are
not locked into only one.

Mark:
Wouldn't you say that is the feature of the Net Bible?

Hall:
Absolutely.

Mark:Not just the accuracy of
the
translation itself but to walk through the mind as best as possible of
the translator and many of the decisions that were in the backdrop of
why those decisions are made.

Hall:It's like you are able
to look
over the translators shoulder as he or she is working on the text and
see what is going through their mind
as they make those decisions.

Mark:In most English
translations you
might have a couple of options may have a box saying, "may also be
translated," and you look at that and you see it, "Okay." In the NET
Bible you
are saying with the extensive notes you are seeing some of that
backdrop.

Hall:Yes, for many of the
difficult
passages, you are laying out actual different alternatives that are
effected by all sorts of decisions, including the grammar, the context
and other issues and looking at what led the translators and editors to
make their choices the way they did. So those are two ways of handling
it. I think they both are effective. You can read one of these parallel
column translations or you can look at the NET Bible or look at the
notes and see.

Darrell:This is helpful
because I think
we have generated a lot of discussion. I am talking about the Church
community at large on these issues and to actually get into the guts if
I can say it that way of what translation work evolves I hope leaves an
impression with people of how complex translation work is. This is
paraphrase of the saying I think I heard it somewhere that every
translator is both a liar and a truth teller and that's dealing with
the ambiguities that a translator is always having to dealing with and
the judgments they are having to make.

I thank you all for being with us today and for taking the time to do
this and Mark why don't you close us.

Mark:Lord, thank you so much
for today and
we thank you for your great cause. Thank you for you word that is
transforming our lives through the power of your Son, Jesus. It's a
great privilege to be students of your words and to be recipients of
that and to take it to those that need to hear your word faithfully. We
ask that you would help us to do that. Again, we just thank you for
this time together and ask that it will benefit many in the midst of a
wonderful discussion. We thank you for this in Jesus' name we pray.
Amen.

[music]

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